California has slipped one notch in the bragging-rights totem pole to rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy in the latest update on global business output.

Using gross domestic product as the yardstick, my trusty spreadsheet compared new 2025 estimates for nations, released by the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday, Oct. 14, to state-level readings for the second quarter of 2025 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, released in September.

The Golden State economy was generating goods and services at a nationwide leading annual rate of $4.215 trillion in the second quarter – up 5% in a year, according to the BEA. That ranked fourth-best on a global scale when compared with the IMF’s April scorecard – behind only the U.S., China, and Germany.

But the latest IMF estimate for 2025

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